ABSTRACT
The era when The Cosby Show ran, then, was one in which ideological conflict around class, race, citizenship, and consumption practices was not, as Fukuyama claimed, overcome. Both popular and academic discourses on The Cosby Show have focused on the eponymous family's post-racial representation. Discourses about the show's children have also positioned the characters' relationships with their white contemporaries within a post-racial context, so that they undergo the same kind of bildungsroman angst and trajectory as other, whiter, 1980s coming-of-age narratives, without any particular experience rooted in racial difference. The chapter situates the show's children within a wider post-racial context that dominated American political and social culture during the period 1984–1992 when the show ran. This was the era of triumphant Reaganomics, punctuated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and bookended with Francis Fukuyama's influential panegyric to neo-liberalism's victory over every other possible form of ideology, The End of History and the Last Man.
